Trump bombs at the Al Smith dinner; his fans declare victory over the “wicked bitch”

Hillary Clinton listening to Trump at the Al Smith dinner, and looking forward to her imminent landslide victory

If you watched Trump’s appearance at the Al Smith dinner last night, you might be forgiven for concluding that he bombed, big league.

The annual charity dinner is sort of a political version of a celebrity roast, albeit one that is a little less vicious and a lot less funny. The main task of any politician speaking at the event is to demonstrate the rudiments of a sense of humor, especially when it comes to jokes directed at them.

Trump failed. Unlike Hillary, who managed to more or less get into the spirit of the thing, Trump’s only decent self-deprecating joke, if you can call it that, was at Melania’s expense, not his own. And he devoted most of his time to nasty attacks on Hillary that didn’t even vaguely resemble jokes, managing to draw actual boos from the crowd in the process.

At the Al Smith charity dinner, Trump laid a trap for the elites and unleashed his vengeance on a gathering of effete plutocrats, smug globalist whores, lapdog media hacks, intellectually inbred urbanites, and the Wicked Bitch herself. …

He nuked the ruling class and the Clinton Machine from orbit and took a piss on their smoldering ashes.

Weidmann continues on in this vein for several more paragraphs, but I imagine you’ve got the gist of his, er, argument already.

Amazingly, Weidmann has managed to find another Trump fan whose, er, analysis of the event is even more histrionic than his own, an anonymous fellow running a blog called Face to Face. Here’s what that dude has to say on the subject:

[T]he time for yukking it up with the Establishment is over. Watch as Trump the court jester begins with his routine of juggling several glistening knives in the air, for the amusement of the white-tie audience, then calmly collects them one by one into his hands, and throws them straight into the chests of the plutocrats and the media.

The courtiers mocked him as a reality TV clown, and struck cruel blows against his little-people supporters whenever they felt like a little entertainment. So the jester decides to put on a show for the court where “Trump acts like Trump” and they’re all laughing along with the act. He convinces them it would be a riot for them to put on wax masks showing elitist caricatures, then begins a fire-breathing routine — only to spit the fire right onto their masks. As the courtiers scramble around the ballroom with their faces ablaze, the jester and his little-people companions storm out and burn down the rest of the palace.

Yipes. I think someone’s metaphoric license needs to be revoked.

If you want to watch what actually happened at the dinner when Trump got up to speak, here are some of the highlights, by which I mean lowlights.

It’s not the only one, and I never claimed it was. Your reading comprehension score is 2/10.

And, still, none of this bullshit posturing has anything at all to do with your convoluted argument. Calling something god, doesn’t make it god. This has fuck all to do with any ontological argument. What you’re doing is even lazier.

To clarify, ontological arguments are bad attempts at deduction. Your suggestion isn’t based on any kind of deduction. You’re just picking a thing at random and calling it by a different name, thinking you’ve actually accomplished anything. A is A, even if you call it B.

If this kind of nonsense is “meaningful” to you, then by all means go ahead and derive all the meaning you want.

@moggie – I wouldn’t argue that there’s not a bad culture in banking (and some other industries) there obviously is! I’m simply arguing that full dark triad isn’t overall a good business personality, because in most of business you have to work with others.

One of the things that hurts banking particularly is the burn and churn culture of the workforce. Used to be you’d stay in a role for a long time – now they burn people out and there’s a lot of churn in the workforce – which encourages people to have little loyalty to their employers or their teammates.

PoM, I get that you don’t like IP for reasons I’ll never understand, but that doesn’t mean you have to be a dismissive, condescending “Hurr hurr, you’re offended therefore I win” asshole to them every time you disagree on some irrelevant point. Grow up, this is embarrassing for all of us.

Not touching the other one, but Pokemon Go, hell yes. My town could furnish a month’s worth of those news reports about struggling businesses bursting back to life. =P No Snorlaxes for me yet, but there’s an Eevee nest a few km down the road, which has been pretty awesome.

My apartment is an Eevee nest. :p I get one or two Eevees every hour on average. Since the last update they seem to all suck though.

When Otter and I went to London this summer, there was a Snorlax inside the theater before the Harry Potter play. Everyone around us caught it, but we didn’t have data. Then we spent 5 weeks in the US chasing Snorlaxes with no luck. Since we got back, I hadn’t seen a single one on my nearby list until today. I got up and walked around the building while Otter went the other direction. I ended up finding it in the woods outside, but it disappeared before Otter could catch it. :/

Even though its IVs suck (9-3-9), it’s still nice to finally have it in the Dex and use the buddy slot for candies.

Did you catch any other rare ones? I got a few Aerodactyls and of course Tauroses from the US trip.

PoM, I get that you don’t like IP for reasons I’ll never understand, but that doesn’t mean you have to be a dismissive, condescending “Hurr hurr, you’re offended therefore I win” asshole to them every time you disagree on some irrelevant point. Grow up, this is embarrassing for all of us.

Oh for the love of… You can practically hear her stroking a fluffy white cat with this one, huh.

No, PoM, I’m not taking sides; I don’t know what the sides even are. Until you explain exactly what your beef is, because the other threads sure as shit haven’t made it any clearer, what I’m doing is defending my friend from being attacked for (from my point of view) no fucking reason. I’ve respected you since I was a newbie, but that doesn’t mean I’m going to sit quietly and let you bully IP.

Not really, aside from a couple of Magmars and enough Kangaskhans to feed my cat for a month, but I’ve been spending most of my non-Eevee time working on my quest to get a 100% IV Pidgeot anyway. I’m up to 96%! =P

Hey, do you have one of those Go Plus things? If not, totally recommended; they’re not that great for catching (though they have gotten better since the medal update), but they make hatching eggs and walking buddies so much easier. Less battery usage, more steps actually recorded, whoo!

I have no beef. I have zero ill will toward IP. It’s incredibly obvious to me that IP has tons of ill will toward me, which I understand and that’s fine. That’s why I usually just don’t respond to IP at all, but this time I wasn’t going to just say nothing while the only thing that I, as an atheist, find kind of spiritual was slammed down for what appeared to me to be, to quote you, no fucking reason. I don’t have any persistent ill will for IP, but that doesn’t mean I’m going to roll over when IP does attack me out of nowhere due to what certainly looks to me like ill will in my direction.

What’s interesting to me is that you read this the completely opposite way. You even read my statement that I found your statement “interesting” in the completely opposite way I intended it. So I’m not sure what kind of response you actually want out of me, or what would be acceptable to you.

Your default, and only, setting is condescending asshat. It’s not just with me – I’ve never seen you get into a disagreement with anyone without immediately entering dickhead mode. Even before I started commenting here, I made a mental note to never address you directly, unless absolutely necessary. I haven’t followed my own advice, and the consequences have been entirely predictable.

You have a ridiculously inflated view of yourself, in that you think you’re an expert on every issue ever. In every conversation, you turn splainy and weirdly aggressive for no fucking reason, even when it’s clear you have no clue what you’re talking about.

I do appreciate many of your contributions to these comment sections, and you have great insights from time to time, but frankly you are a fucking nightmare to be around. I stand by my view of you as a toxic human being.

Hah! I didn’t even really know about the Go Plus gadget. I already look geeky enough without it! :p Seems very useful though. I’ll discuss it with my Otter, since Christmas and birthdays are coming up.

I’m so jelly of the Kangaskhans. Our Mr. Mimes aren’t nearly as cool. I can’t afford to travel to Australia and Japan right now…

I haven’t caught any 100% IV pokémon so far. I have a 98% Diglett and a 98% Nidoking (both 15-14-15). My Dex is at 127/132, and I’m expecting my first Blastoise tomorrow or at least this week. Raichu, Sandslash, Dugtrio, Golem, Dewgong, Marowak, Weezing, and Kabuops are all coming up fairly soon. I’m worried about Venusaur and Charizard. Charmanders and Bulbasaur seem extremely rare here, but Otter caught a wild Venusaur in Galveston this summer. It fled from me. 🙁

The whole ‘dark triad’ business just makes me sneer so hard my face may freeze that way.

First, the idea that dark triad characteristics make you clever or capable is just stooooopid. They don’t. It’s right up there with the whole “Sherlock” thing about being a ‘high functioning sociopath’. No, personality disorders don’t make you a genius.

Secondly, we seem to be talking here about a group of people who have selected a leader on the actual grounds that he’s a narcissist and sociopath, and he’ll COME THROUGH FOR THEM.

What part of ‘narcissist and sociopath’ do they not get? The fundamental characteristic of such a person is that they do not have your back. That’s like, the point. Do they assume he’s not conning THEM, or do they just not care?

The problem, of course, is that it SOUNDS cool. Paulhus and Williams should have called it ‘Pathetic Asshole Triad’ instead. “Dark Triad” is just too romantic.

Trump cant even crack a funny joke, I’m not a Hilary fan (think the US election is rigged, nothing will change for average people) Hilary’s face says it all really. shell be smiling again when she wins though.

Perhaps trump has so many money issues that running for us presidency is a way for him to make money? The more outrageous things he says the more publicity/money made? no one just decides to get political and go straight for the position of commander and chief – unless they’ve really not thought it through.

Note to Miggy: I’m not sure what you think you’re accomplishing by trying to comment here. Your comments go directly to moderation. They never appear on the site. The only person who sees them is me, and I delete them without reading them.

I thought it was possible that Miggs was a returning troll, but if he hasn’t figured out how to sock after all these weeks, I guess not. You’d think a 290 year old engineer would be wise enough to figure it out.

@wwth
I don’t even think he even considers his act of using a man as a beat stick to win an internet argument as wrong. I think that weeks after his act, I don’t think he feels bad about doing that in the least. If he did feel any form of regret, he wouldn’t commit so wholeheartedly into a rhetoric that he violated so casually.

@RarePolarBear
I would like to hear on what you believe rigged and average people to be. If we’re talking about sensationalist media not doing their jobs maybe we can have some meaningful dialogue.

If you bring /pol/ shit, please leave. I don’t like associating with cloak and dagger bigotry.

Washington Journal this Sunday was all about this. They had two election experts on. One was a Professor Overton (not the ‘Overton Window’ chap though)

The consensus was that it would be impossible to rig the election in the sense Trump may have been talking about (although when asked what Trump means by ‘rig’ even the Republican guy said ‘depends what day it is’)

They did have an interesting discussion about elections generally though, from voter registration to how those mechanical and electronic machines work. That was especially interesting to those of us from a country where we still use a pencil.

Snap!
It’s not actually compulsory to use a pencil on an Australian ballot paper, but it is compulsory that they are provided at the ballot box.
The government opted to provide pencils rather than pens because they are cheap, can’t leak all over a ballot paper or dry out when stored between elections, are easily sharpened when they break, etc.
It’s perfectly legal for voters here to bring their own pen and use that. Postal voters use their own pen without a second thought.

We Hunted the Mammoth tracks and mocks the white male rage underlying the rise of Trump and Trumpism. This blog is NOT a safe space; given the subject matter -- misogyny and hate -- there's really no way it could be.